This invention relates generally to account reconciliation and, more specifically, to computer-based methods and systems for account reconciliation.
Individual business units typically produce spreadsheet based accounting reports. The accounting spreadsheets are then submitted to a centralized operation, e.g. a treasury operation, for review. The centralized operation then manually contacts the individual businesses to reconcile any action plan they have reported.
Known account reconciliation methods have several disadvantages. For example, the current methods and systems are largely spreadsheet based. Multiple groups of employees conduct account reconciliation and the accuracy of the accounting depends on the experience and knowledge of the employees. In addition, using known methods and systems can be time consuming. Additionally, a business entity involved in managing multi-national operations deals with significant complexity in managing account reconciliation of each of the multi-national operations. Generally, in such a scenario, each of the operations manually completes their own reconciliation, mostly through spreadsheet software such as Excel®, and submits the completed documents to corporate treasury for review. (Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.) Often, it is necessary to re-input the data to recreate the documents at the corporate level. Re-inputting data may expose the business entity to data integrity issues because of possible data entry errors. Furthermore, these additional steps take valuable time away from operations analysts which could have been spent on evaluating and analyzing actual reconciliation of accounts.